As more and more information is collected, housed, and analyzed within an electronic environment, timely processing that information in a useful time frame becomes more challenging. This is especially true in a business environment where often the information is interrelated, voluminous, and regularly accessed by a plurality of users.
The challenge is even more acute when a string or chain of information, which is used by a particular enterprise application, is in various states of readiness when it is needed. That is, some information may be in a draft form whereas other parts of the information may be in a production ready form.
Generally, the way this problem is handled is to manually walk the chain of information and determine the individual status for each portion of the information. As is readily apparent, walking the chain of interrelated information can entail excessive database access to retrieve each individual status and can also result in heavy processing load in order to create or walk the chain or graph associated with the information. What is more troubling, is that the entire chain or graph has to be walked for each update to the information or each time the information is to be processed as a whole unit.
Thus, it can be seen that improved status tracking and processing for information chains are desirable.